84 TIN MINING IN PERAK. 



in "laucliiits " and afterwards with brass sieves, used like a 

 " dillueing " sieve, until it is clean enough for the Straits Trading 

 Company to buy, that is to say from seventy to seventy - three 

 per cent of metal. 



This system, if it is permissible to dignify it by such a term, 

 is a combination of hydraulic ground sluicing and panning. 

 Fortunately the land being piped is so rich that this rude 

 method of working pays handsomely. With a properly con- 

 structed sluice, working for say twenty hoiu's a day, about double 

 the amount of ground could be cut down and put through with 

 from one third to one half of the laliour. The earth is free and 

 loamy, so there is little or no trouble with clay balls or stones. 

 The tailings are reported to be too poor in tin to be worked at a 

 profit by the women. An offer of 10 cents per " kati " of tin 

 sand not being considered remunerative. 



The next ventui'e was at Benkong, in the district of Batang 

 Padang, some twelve miles from the town of Tapah. In 1895 

 Mr. A. H. A. Woodgate, of the firm of Messrs. W. F. Higginson 

 & Co., put up there half a mile of six -inch pipes, with a monitor 

 of the same pattern and size as that used at Gopeng. The head 

 of water was two hundred feet, and the nozzles iised varied from 

 one to three inches in diameter, according to the amount of 

 water availalde. The line of sluice boxes was thirty inches wide 

 by foiu' hundred feet in length ; below which there was a tail- 

 race one thousand feet long. The full water supply Ijeing inter- 

 mittant the sluice did not work well, and was discarded in 

 favour of a ditch of about a thousand feet in length, which had 

 previously been used by the Malays for their ground sluicing. 



The upper portions of the ditch are planked and graded 

 in sections, with perpendicular drops or falls of fifteen feet 

 between each section. Of these the upper sections ai'e cleaned 

 up every three days, and the lower ones once a month. The 

 water supply lieing insuflicient to work the monitor with full 

 effect it was done away with. The six -inch pipes from the 

 intake, for a distance of six hundred and sixty feet, giving a 

 fall of two hundred feet, were retained, but they are then 

 reduced to four inches, at the end of which a flexible nozzle 

 has been used, with better effect than could have been produced 

 with the monitor. The land was being worked with a face 

 varying from twenty to forty feet in height, and being gen- 

 erally very friable comes down in large masses ; and the water 

 deUvered by the four -inch pipes being insiifiicient to treat this 

 properly, a further siipply is introduced through an open head- 

 race at a lower level. 



